‘Let me tell you, Mr Jeffs,’ said Mrs Hammond.
‘Oh now, it doesn’t matter.’
‘The table belonged to my grandmother, who died and left it to me in her will.’
‘Do not fret, Mrs Hammond. It’s all perfectly all right.’
‘We thought it ugly, my husband and I, so we decided to be rid of it.’
‘Your husband thought it was ugly?’
‘Well, yes. But I more than he. He doesn’t notice things so much.’
Mr Jeffs thought that he had noticed Mrs Galbally all right when Mrs Galbally had walked into this house. Mrs Hammond was lying her head off, he said to himself, because she was trying to save face: she knew quite well where the table was, she had known all along. She had wept because she could not bear the thought of it, her grandmother’s ugly table in the abode of sin.
‘So we put in an advertisement. We had only two replies. You and a woman.’
Mr Jeffs stood up, preparatory to going.
‘You see,’ said Mrs Hammond, ‘we don’t have room in a place like this for a table like that. It doesn’t fit in. Well, you can see for yourself.’
Mr Jeffs looked hard at her, not into her eyes or even at her face: he looked hard and seriously at the green wool of her dress. The woman said:
‘But almost as soon as it had gone I regretted everything. I remember the table all my life. My grandmother had left it to me as an act of affection as well as generosity.’
Mr Jeffs reckoned that the table had stood in the grandmother’s hall. He reckoned that Mrs Hammond as a child had been banished from rooms and had been bidden to stand by the table in the hall, crying and moaning. The table had mocked her childhood and it was mocking her again, with silent watching in an attic room. He could see the two of them, Mrs Galbally and Hammond, placing their big bulbous brandy glasses on the table and marching toward one another for a slick kiss.
‘Once I had sold it to you I couldn’t get it out of my mind. I remembered that my grandmother had always promised it to me. She was the only one who was kind to me as a child, Mr Jeffs. I felt that truly I had thrown all her love back at her. Every night since I sold it to you I’ve had wretched dreams. So you see why I was so very upset.’
The grandmother was cruel, thought Mr Jeffs. The. grandmother punished the child every hour of the day, and left the table as a reminder of her autocratic soul. Why could not Mrs Hammond speak the truth? Why could she not say that the spirit of the old dead grandmother had passed into the table and that the spirit and the table were laughing their heads off in Mrs Galbally’s room? Imagine, thought Mr Jeffs, a woman going to such lengths, and a woman whom he had passingly respected.
‘I’m sorry I’ve burdened you with all this, Mr Jeffs. I’m sorry it’s been such a bother. You have a kindly face.’
‘I am a Jewish dealer, madam. I have a Jewish nose; I am not handsome; I cannot smile.’
He was angry because he thought that she was patronizing him. She was lying still, and all of a sudden she was including him in her lies. She was insulting him with her talk of his face. Did she know his faults, his weaknesses? How dare she speak so?
‘The table should have passed from me to my daughter. It should have stayed in the family. I didn’t think.’
Mr Jeffs allowed himself to close his eyes. She can sit there telling those lies, he thought, one after another, while her own child plays innocently in the next room. The child will become a liar too. The child in her time will grow to be a woman who must cover up the humiliations she has suffered, who must put a face on things, and make the situation respectable with falsehoods.
With his eyes closed and his voice speaking in his mind, Mr Jeffs saw the figure of himself standing alone in his large Victorian house. Nothing was permanent in the house, not a stick of furniture remained there month by month. He sold and bought again. He laid no carpets, nor would he ever. He owned but the old wireless set because someone once had told him it was worthless.
‘Why are you telling me lies?’ shouted Mr Jeffs. ‘Why can’t you say the truth?’
He heard his voice shouting those words at Mrs Hammond and he saw the image of himself, standing quietly on the bare boards of his house. It was not his way to go shouting at people, or becoming involved, or wishing for lies to cease. These people were a law unto themselves; they did not concern him. He cooked his own food; he did not bother people.
‘Your grandmother is dead and buried,’ said Mr Jeffs to his amazement. ‘It is Mrs Galbally who is alive. She takes her clothes off, Mrs Hammond, and in comes your husband and takes off his. And the table sees. The table you have always known. Your childhood table sees it all and you cannot bear it. Why not be honest, Mrs Hammond? Why not say straight out to me: “Jew man, bargain with this Mrs Galbally and let me have my childhood table back.” I understand you, Mrs Hammond. I understand all that. I will trade anything on God’s earth, Mrs Hammond, but I understand that.’
There was a silence again in the room, and in it Mr Jeffs moved his eyes around until their gaze alighted on the face of Mrs Hammond. He saw the face sway, gently, from side to side, for Mrs Hammond was shaking her head. ‘I did not know any of that,’ Mrs Hammond was saying. Her head ceased to shake: she seemed like a statue.
Mr Jeffs rose and walked through the deep silence to the door. He turned then, and walked back again, for he had left behind him Mrs Hammond’s cheque. She seemed not to notice his movements and he considered it wiser in the circumstances not to utter the sounds of farewell. He left the house and started up the engine of his Austin van.
He saw the scene differently as he drove away: Mrs Hammond hanging her head and he himself saying that the lies were understandable. He might have brought Mrs Hammond a crumb of comfort, a word or two, a subtle shrug of the shoulder. Instead, in his clumsiness, he had brought her a shock that had struck her a blow. She would sit there, he imagined, just as he had left her, her face white, her body crouched over her sorrow; she would sit like that until her husband breezily arrived. And she would look at him in his breeziness and say: ‘The Jewish dealer has been and gone. He was there in that chair and he told me that Mrs Galbally has opened up a love-nest for you.’
Mr Jeffs drove on, aware of a sadness but aware as well that his mind was slowly emptying itself of Mrs Hammond and her husband and the beautiful Mrs Galbally. ‘I cook my own food,’ said Mr Jeffs aloud. ‘I am a good trader, and I do not bother anyone.’ He had no right to hope that he might have offered comfort. He had no business to take such things upon himself, to imagine that a passage of sympathy might have developed between himself and Mrs Hammond.
‘I cook my own food,’ said Mr Jeffs again. ‘I do not bother anyone.’ He drove in silence after that, thinking of nothing at all. The chill of sadness had left him, and the mistake he had made appeared to him as a fact that could not be remedied. He noticed that dusk was falling; and he returned to the house where he had never lit a fire, where the furniture loomed and did not smile at him, where nobody wept and nobody told a lie.
A School Story
Every night after lights-out in the dormitory there was a ceremonial storytelling. One by one we contributed our pieces, holding the stage from the gloom for five or six minutes apiece. Many offerings were of a trite enough order: the Englishman, the Irishman and the Scotsman on a series of desert islands, and what the drunk said to the Pope. But often the stories were reaclass="underline" reminiscences from a short past, snippets of overheard conversation, descriptions of the naked female body in unguarded moments. Only Markham deliberately repeated himself, telling us again and again, and by unanimous demand, about the death of his mother. On a night when no one had much to say, Markham would invariably be called upon; and none of us ever expected to hear anything new. We were satisfied that it was so; because Markham told his story well and it was, to us, a fascinating one.